GraphConnect San Francisco

Back at home, Christian and I are full of energy, still impressed by all those positive impressions that hit us at GraphConnect 2013 in San Francisco. Time to write down some observations and thoughts.

GraphConnect Conference

Not only has GraphConnect evolved from being a (quite big) satellite of the QCon San Francisco in 2012 to a 400+ attendees standalone conference, it has become a relevant tech event in the silicon valley and beyond.

And despite from being a well-organized conference, GraphConnect San Francisco 2013 was refreshingly far from being a pure marketing event where you often see vendors celebrate their products and customers intone their hymn of praise in return of large discounts.

All customers I met at GC were praising Neo4j because its positive impact on their business, or they were early adopters and just enthusiastic about Neo4j.

Community in the First Row

It was good to see that the community around Neo4j still sits in the first row of this conference (let's hope that it stays this way forever).

Neo Technology invited all authors of Neo4j drivers to a hackathon with the purpose to improve the drivers and make the code base fit for the upcoming release 2.0. They got together in a hotel in SF and hacked, supported by Neo4j experts. This awesome idea led to massive improvements of the codebase of every single driver. Read Peter's blog post with more details.

I wish we'd written also a Neo4j driver, just to be part of this event. ;-) But of course, Peter and the community team had to draw a line somewhere. There are so many community projects established around Neo4j over the past 2-3 years that I assume there was simply not enough space (and wifi throughput) in one single hotel lobby to host them all.

Evolving Neo4j Ecosystem

Some rather application-like community projects had the opportunity to speak at GraphConnect, like Linkurious (Graph Visualization), GrapheneDB (Neo4j as a Service), or Structr (Content Management / Web Application Framework). These three community projects are part of the growing Neo4j Ecosystem, and plan to join forces to provide the best-possible user experience by supporting each other and create modules/plug-ins/interfaces. I'm looking forward to meetings in Paris and on the Canary Islands. ;-)

Christian and I, representing the Structr Team, enjoyed every single minute of being over in San Francisco at GraphConnect. We're really proud to be a member of this ecosystem, and we look forward to help it evolving!

After the conference is before the conference

My presentation about "Building Graph-based Web-Applications with Structr 1.0" is available at http://slides.structr.org/graphconnect-san-francisco-2013#/. It's an HTML5 presentation made with reveal.js, stored in Structr itself. About 70% of the presentation was a live demo, so I've added screencasts for all demo parts.

Next opportunities to see a live presentation of Structr are:

GOTO Berlin: Presentation: "Building Graph-Based Web Applications with Structr 1.0 and Neo4j"

GraphConnect London: Building Graph-Based Web Applications with Structr 1.0

Looking forward to seeing you there!